Following the Curiosity rover’s suspenseful descent and landing on Mars, and euphoric celebrations, NASA officials and scientists around the country began inspecting the first images to return from Mars and awaited more.

Along Colorado’s Front Range, several companies and organizations have a stake.

Curiosity is about the size of a compact car and is designed to function as a roving laboratory. It tumbled to a landing Sunday night inside Mars’ Gale Crater — right on target after an eight-month, 352-million-mile journey.

Weighing 1 ton, the rover plummeted through the thin Martian atmosphere at more than 13,000 mph.

Then it had to stop within seven minutes, unfurling a parachute, firing rockets to brake. Cables lowered it to the ground at 2 mph.

At the end of what NASA officials called “seven minutes of terror,” the vehicle settled into the crater.

“We have ended one phase of the mission much to our enjoyment,” mission manager Mike Watkins said. “But another part has just begun.”

A nuclear-powered craft, Curiosity is to dig into the Martian surface to analyze what’s there and hunt for molecular building blocks of life, including carbon.

It won’t start moving for a couple of weeks, because systems on the $2.5 billion rover have to be checked out. Color photos, panoramas and video are expected to start arriving over the next few days.

NASA relied on tiny cameras designed to spot hazards in front of Curiosity’s wheels. The first images included many shots of gravel and shadows. The pictures were fuzzy, but scientists were delighted.

The photos show “a new Mars we have never seen before,” Watkins said. “So every one of those pictures is the most beautiful picture I have ever seen.”

Colorado-based engineers contributed to the mission. Nearly nine months ago, NASA’s $2.5 billion machine was sent on its space trajectory aboard a rocket created by United Launch Alliance, which has headquarters in Centennial. Placing the spacecraft on its the correct path was crucial for the spacecraft’s successful landing.

The rover, which weighs 1,982 pounds, is heavier than any spacecraft sent previously to Mars. As a result, it entered the atmosphere at a greater velocity than previous Mars missions. This required a specially designed “aeroshell” — comprised of a heat shield and back shell — which was developed and built by Lockheed Martin in Jefferson County.

“There’s a lot of heritage legacy around these aeroshell capsules in the Denver area,” said Gary Napier, spokesman for Lockheed Martin.

According to Napier, the design dates back to the Viking 1 orbiter in 1976, but with a new, more heat-resistant material.

Southwest Research Institute’s Boulder office created one of the 10 high-tech science instruments that will collect data related to Mars’ habitability. The mission’s primary goal is to determine past, present, and future elements that either facilitate or inhibit life on the planet.

The institute developed the Radiation Assessment Detector, RAD, which will analyze the characteristics of Mars’ radiation.

“It really is like I keep pinching myself. Everything has been working like clockwork,” said Don Hassler, a Southwest Research Institute scientist and principal investigator of RAD. “This is the first time we’ve characterized the radiation environment on any planet.”

RAD was one of the first instruments turned on after Curiosity’s landing and will be sending data back to NASA immediately. United Launch Alliance is sending another NASA mission into space on one of its rockets at the end of August.

Lockheed Martin has begun constructing the next Mars mission spacecraft — the MAVEN orbiter — which will be launched in November 2013. MAVEN’s principal investigator, Bruce Jakosky, is from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Because of budget constraints, NASA canceled its joint U.S.-European missions to Mars, scheduled for 2016 and 2018.

“When’s the next lander on Mars? The answer to that is nobody knows,” Bolden said recently in an interview with The Associated Press.

If Curiosity finds something interesting, he said, it could spur the public and Congress to provide more money for more Martian exploration. No matter what, he said, Curiosity’s mission will help NASA as it tries to send astronauts to Mars by the mid-2030s.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Black and white images

Why isn’t the red planet red? Initial images transmitted from Mars are black and white shots from hazard cameras near the bottom of the rover and from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

More sophisticated color pictures and video will arrive back on Earth in the days to come.

Kristen Leigh Painter was a former business reporter who focused on airlines and aerospace coverage. She joined The Post in September 2011 and departed for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in August 2014. She graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder with a master's in journalism after earning a bachelor's in history from the University of Wisconsin La Crosse.

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